Academy Award-winning actress Geena Davis (“The Fly,” “A League of Their Own”) lamented how “great roles” became scarce for her after she turned 40.
Speaking with The Guardian, Davis lamented that once she had “a four in front of my age,” she fell “off the cliff.”
“In the early stages of my career, I was blithely going along thinking, ‘Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange and Sally Field, they’re all making these great female-centric movies,” she said. “And I’m getting these great roles, really tippy-top roles, so things must be getting better for women.’ But suddenly, the great roles were incredibly scarce. It was a big difference.”
Earlier in the interview, Davis also could not fathom why the success of her movies “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own” did not lead to Hollywood creating more movies with female leads.
“Everyone said: ‘Now we’re going to have so many movies starring women.’ And I was like: ‘Hot dog! I’m in something that started change.’ And then ‘A League of Their Own’ comes out and everyone says: ‘Now there’s going to be so many women’s sports movies!’ And five years go by … It was a shock that absolutely nothing happened,” she said.
Geena Davis helped co-found the non-profit Bentonville Film Festival in 2015 to “promote women and minorities in the film business,” according to The Guardian. Ultimately, she wants a world where storytellers accurately reflect the population, which means male, women, and minority directors apportioned by demographic percentages.
“Oh, we want to change the world!” she said. “Our goal is very simple: the storytellers and people on screen should reflect the population, which is half female and incredibly diverse. It’s not like: ‘Wow, what a far-fetched idea!’ It just makes total sense.”
At the age of 40, Geena Davis became an action heroine with the 1996 spy thriller “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” in which she starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson; it would be her last outing in such a role. Actress Charlize Theron recently lamented about the alleged sexism she herself faced as an action heroine ever since starring in “The Italian Job.”
“I realized there was still so much misconception around women in the genre,” she said on the “Evolution of a Bada**s” panel during Comic-Con@Home. “The only good thing that came out of that experience was that there was a real pressure to pull off those stunts with the actors – and that was the first time I experienced anything like that. But there was a very unfair process that went with that. I was the only woman with a bunch of guys, and I remember vividly getting the schedule in our preproduction and they had scheduled me for six weeks more car training than any of the guys.”
“It was just so insulting, but it was also the thing that put a real fire under my a** and I was like, ‘All right, you guys want to play this game? Let’s go,’” she continued. “I made it a point to out-drive all of those guys. I vividly remember Mark Wahlberg, halfway through one of our training sessions, pulling over and throwing up because he was so nauseous from doing 360s.”
Related: Charlize Theron Laments ‘Unfair,’ Sexist Treatment As An Action Movie Heroine